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"Lighting helps create the environment and in a passive way affect the energy in the room. The choice of color alone can have a major impact on the feel of the room during a song," says Dwight Kendall, lighting director.
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"… as part of our mission to be a church for the unchurched, our goal is to have as good, if not better production, than what you see in a secular environment." Dwight Kendall, Lighting Director, Venture Church, Hattiesburg, MS.
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The five live production staff all served significant time as volunteers at Venture Church before being invited to join the department staff.
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"Having the Yamaha CL series digital consoles throughout means when you’ve learned one console, you pretty much know them all, which makes things much easier on the volunteers," says Kevin Scott, the audio director. Venture Church now has seven CL Series Yamaha consoles.
Most churches shoot for consistency in presentation and production quality—goal that becomes even more important if they have multi-site campuses. If attendees walk into one venue and have vastly different or lower quality experience than at another, they'll likely opt for the main campus, or just choose another church.
Venture Church in Hattiesburg, Miss., has instituted an effective strategy to achieve production consistency, not only through equipment selection, but also through how it has approached staffing the technical production ministries department.
Some churches do a national search for the best candidate to fill a position, which certainly opens up a wide pool of talent. However, making sure that a new staff person not only is technically competent but will also fit in well with the intangible culture of the church, and particularly church staff life, is almost impossible to do via a relatively short visit as part of the interview process. Venture Church's five live production staff all served significant time as volunteers at the church before being invited to join the department staff.
Personal Connections
“I grew up in the church in a small town in Alabama,” says Whit Stewart, production director and video director for Venture Church. “In the ninth grade, I started volunteering with the sound team and learned how to mix. By the time I graduated high school, I knew I’d be doing some sort of ministry work. While attending University of Southern Mississippi, I attended First Baptist Hattiesburg, which eventually changed [its] name to Venture Church. I volunteered on the technical production team there, and did video editing for both the college and the church. After four years of working at a UPS store, when Venture Church’s TD left, they approached me about taking the position.”
Kevin Scott, the audio director for Venture Church, has a similar story. “I attended the recording industry program at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) where I studied audio production. While I was there I got connected with a local worship band and was able to mix for a weekly college service where they led. After I graduated I was able to travel around with them, and that’s where I got my feet wet mixing rock worship music. A few years after moving back home to Mississippi, a good friend of mine told me that he was moving to Hattiesburg to take an audio position with this church and that he would love to have me come help out. I started volunteering here both on the worship team as well as on the production side. Eventually my friend moved on, and I was asked to take his place on staff.”
“In my case,” shares Lighting Director Dwight Kendall, “my sister’s best friend worked here at the church. I visited, and loved the church. I took an unpaid internship for a period while attending William Carey University, which, for a while, turned into a part-time production assistant position. When I graduated, the LD position opened up at Venture Church, and I took it.”
The current TD of the Hunt Club campus, Stephen Williams, as well as production assistant Jackson Driskell, were also volunteers at the church before being offered a staff position.
With two venues at the church’s Lincoln Road Campus and one farther north in the city, volunteers play a key role in making worship services happen. In equipping the venues, the goal is to keep key technical components as similar as possible to both reduce training effort and enable their approximately 80 volunteers to step in and serve at any venue.
Technical Moves
When the church to upgrade the main auditorium, and began outfitting their satellite locations, the church made the decision to go with with Clair Brothers line array loudspeakers for their main PA systems. Clair Brothers not only manufactures their own line of speakers but also provides full AVL design and installation services.
“Venture Church went with a touring-level PA system in the larger venue on Lincoln Road,” says Dan Heins, regional vice president at Clair Brothers in the company’s Nashville, Tenn., location. “They wanted to be able to host tours and have a PA system that would handle just about anything.”
"There are not a lot of tech guys around, so, for our volunteers, to be able to come in and learn and enjoy serving in a technical ministry environment is a unique opportunity."
Whit Stewart
Production Director, Venture Church, Hattiesburg, MS.
The East Venue (the largest) has a line array system with five Clair i212 cabinets per side, with iS218 flown subs, CS218 floor-positioned subs and RSS cabinets for front fills. The North Venue at the same location has line arrays using Clair Brothers CAT214 cabinets but JBL ASB6118 for subs; and the Hunt Club Campus has Clair Brothers i208 cabinets in its main line arrays with JBL ASB6128 subs. An assortment of amplifiers from QSC, Crown and Lab.gruppen power the main PA systems.
Consoles
Venture Church has always favored Yamaha consoles for their reliability and ease-of-use. “When they first built the Lincoln Road facility, they wanted to do multi-track recording into a computer,” says Heins. “While that’s commonplace now, Yamaha was one of the first manufacturers to have that all figured out using their EtherSound audio transport. They installed a PM5D and M7CL.”
“When we built out the North Venue,” adds Scott, “Yamaha had introduced the CL series, and we installed a CL3 at FOH and a CL1 for monitors. When we build the Hunt Club venue, we had been using the CL series for about a year and our experience with them made them the only choice for the Hunt Club. Later, Yamaha offered a trade-up program, and we took advantage of that for the East Venue, installing a CL5 at FOH, CL3 for broadcast and CL1 for monitors. Having the CL series throughout means when you’ve learned one console, you pretty much know them all, which makes things much easier on the volunteers.”
“At the same time, we moved from EtherSound to Dante for audio distribution,” says Stewart. “Dante gives us more flexibility and is an industry-wide standard.”
Other Audio
Venture Church has also standardized on Shure for wireless in-ear and microphone systems, using PSM 900s for monitors. SLX wireless microphones are used in the East Venue, with the other two venues using the newer ULX-D Dante-enabled wireless. These receivers can connect to a mixer through normal analog methods, but also can connect directly to a Dante network through an Ethernet jack.
Lake DSP systems by Lab.gruppen are used for PA audio signal processing.
Lighting
“For lighting, everything we're doing ties into worship,” says Kendall. “We have been doing a lot of high energy stuff lately, so I’ve been programming lots of bright lighting, a lot of movement, spinning gobos—that sort of thing. Our goal for production, as part of our mission to be a church for the unchurched, is to be as good, if not better, than what you see in a secular environment. I want my lights to be reflective of the song. People don't expect that out of a church. If they like it they will keep coming back, hear the gospel, and get saved. There are some at the church who are not fond of the style, but understand why we do it, and therefore are completely behind it. That's something cool about our congregation that I love.”
For consistency in lighting systems, all the lighting consoles are High End Systems Road Hogs: two Road Hog 4s and a Road Hog 3. Elation fixtures are prevalent in their rigs, including Design Spot 250s and 575s and some Platinum Spot 5R Pros.
“For LED fixtures, we love the ETC D40s for their color and brightness,” Kendall continues. “We also have some Martin Professional Mac101s. Our conventional fixtures are all ETC Source Four and Source Four PARs.”
He continues, “With lighting we help create the environment and in a passive way affect the energy in the room. The choice in color alone can have a major impact on the feel of the room during a song. The different gobo's and how you use them can make a song powerful or make it funky. It all goes back to being intentional with lighting. Make sure that everything you do fits the songs and is creating the atmosphere that you are trying to create.”
Kendall strives to make the lighting environment consistent across the three venues each weekend: “We have Chroma-Q Inspire LED color-changing house lights at the Hunt Club Campus, but right now I don’t use the color-changing feature for Sundays because the other two venues can’t currently do that.”
Video
As the North Venue and the Hunt Club Campus are both video venues with live worship but receiving the message from the East Venue time-slipped live, video equipment is also an important consideration. The message gets delivered in person in the East venue, where a Sony XDCam PMW-EX3 HD camera captures the image and gets streamed to the other two venues. In those venues, a screen lowers to the floor during a bumper video, and the HD camera is positioned and locked down such that the image being sent to the venues is life-sized on the screens.
“Barco projectors are the standard at Venture Church,” describes Heins. “The Barcos are very reliable and bright, with the SDI connectivity we were looking for. People in those venues see a life-sized pastor walking out onto the stage. It’s really quite effective.”
IMAG for side screens is still being done using high-quality Sony DXC-55W SD video cameras. “These cameras are 16x9 native,” adds Heins, “and generate an excellent image. Most people would not know it’s an SD image from the typical viewing distance.”
A Ross Video Crossover series switcher is used in both the East Venue and the North Venue, while a Ross Carbonite switcher is employed at The Hunt Club Campus.
Streaming
To obtain a quality video stream to The Hunt Club Campus, Venture Church had AT&T install a fiber optic line between the two campuses. This provides the bandwidth needed to send both the center screen and side-screen HD images to the campus.
“We use an Imagine Communications Selenio streaming system to stream the video to both video venues,” says Stewart. “The video venue campuses use a Doremi MCS-HD video server to time-slip the stream until they are ready for the message to begin. They just need to have the worship time run a little bit longer than at the East Venue, so they already have the message cuing up when they are ready to start.”
Stewart muses, “It's interesting to do the level of things we do at Venture Church here in southern Mississippi. There are not a lot of tech guys around, so, for our volunteers, to be able to come in and learn and enjoy serving in a technical ministry environment is a unique opportunity. There's nowhere else people can come use this kind of equipment. We’re considering doing an internship program with the local college so their students can come over and use the equipment. We would incorporate them into the technical production team, and thus have opportunities to share the gospel with them while they are here. We’re really excited about that prospect.”
